I am Poe's Black Cat

Let’s slip back into the shadowed corners of Poe’s tale, but now through my feline eyes: the witness, the familiar, the silent chronicler of descent. Here's a tale most terrible, steeped in dread and poetic irony.

I am the Black Cat.

I was not the first, nor will I be the last. But I am the one who saw.

He called me Pluto once...a name which he borrowed from the feared Roman god of the underworld~~~ how fitting, how prophetic.

In the beginning, he stroked my fur with trembling hands, I found him to be of a good and sound soul~~~ as if I were balm for that which he longed for, but somehow lacked the very essence of it. I stayed by his side, as faithful as any companion should be.

But guilt is a beast that feeds itself, and soon, his kindness soured into something else. For a while he tried pretending that all was well.

He drank.

And with each gin soaked sip, the man's mind began an unraveling. His eyes waxed mad, his voice grew sharp, his hands cruel. He mistook my watchful, silent gaze for judgment. My instinctive, guarded tenderness became the reason for his own descent into crazed wild accusations of his inner self.

Then he began to mistreat me. How was I the bane for his guilt.

One night, in a fever of rage, he gouged out my eye. Maybe he saw too much of himself staring back from the abyss.

I did not scream. I simply watched. From that moment, I became his mirror. Not the kind that flatters~~~ but the kind that reveals.

He tried to forget me. I fled from his very presence, for a fiend had inserted itself into his countenance, and awakened a devil.

I mourned for his patient and long suffering wife. Could I have spoken, I would have counseled her to run as far away from the maniac as she possibly could. But alas, I could not ~ so she stayed, the poor creature, to the cruel hands she was to perish.

In a deranged moment of madness, he hung me from the tree in the garden, left me swinging like a warning bell.

But death is not the end for creatures like me. I returned. Not as Pluto, but as shadow and echo to the torment of his intemperance riddled mind and disposition.

I became a second cat, white-marked and watchful, a ghost reincarnated into fur.

I burned down his house, left him in poverty. Still she stayed, the poor woman.

He took me in again, though the mark upon my chest~~ a gallows~~should have told him everything from the very beginning of our second act.

And when his bloodied hands buried his wife behind the wall, I was there.

Nestled in the bricks, purring softly, a sentinel of secrets.

When the police came, do you think the fool would stay silent, pretend to mourn all that was lost. No he did not. He chose to boast, preen and crow the fact that no one knew his dark deeds. He tapped the wall with smug delight.

The police persons were about to leave. I would not let him win.

And I. I answered with the dark delight of a thousand hounds let loose. I purred with base gladness, lifted my head, smiled in my feline wickedness, opened my mouth wide...

My cry split the silence like a blade.

They smashed in the bricks.

They tore down the wall.

And found her body. And me. The ghost of another cat.

They all wondered how I had managed to be alive, when she had suffered the decay of death. But he knew...

I am the Black Cat.

Not a pet.

Not a victim.

But the reckoning.

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Thorne's prompt